Just making sure I did all the assignments

It seemed sometimes when I read other people's blogs over the quarter that there were random assignments that somehow slipped by me, so I figured I would go back and make sure to do them.

Reaction to Buruma:
I as many of the people in the class finished reading Buruma early in the term, so I had to go back and skim before writing this reaction.
My main reaction to the Buruma book simply has to do with the intersection between cultures, and the issue that hit the Netherlands hard and likely will other Western countries as well. We pride ourselves on our multiculturalism, it's politically correct to accept people of all cultures, backgrounds, and ethnicities. But what happens when the cultures you want to accept seem to be ones that fight directly with values you hold and consider extremely important freedoms. Should it be regulated? How can it be without marginalizing a group of people of which the majority is actually made up of good law abiding citizens. If the Koran says women are lower than men when a fundamental feature of our society is that the sexes are equal should we stop it, can we stop it? These are pretty complicated issues. What do you do when multiculturalism just seems to have bit you in the ass essentially? Can we say it's a bad thing? Or that it needs to be regulated? How so? Who gets to decide what's right and what's wrong? It's a pretty complicated issue, and I certainly don't have any answers....

Zeisel reflection:

Zeisel has actually ended up being one of the most useful readings Mark and I have integrated into our projects. His methods and use of 'traces' as a means for studying people is almost exactly what we would like to do in our project. I've learned a lot about different methodologies, and what works/doesn't work when it comes to them from this paper. As far as learning about observing physical traces as well as enviornmental behavior this has become one of the most important readings of all of them for me personally. It would have been useful to have read this before embarking on our 'reading the city' assignment because we simply just blindly went into the assignment without really knowing what we were looking for. Now we know to pay closer attention to traces people have left as well as the subtleties in their behavior.